Imagine the following scenarios…
- You have recently finished your education at Cherry Hill Seminary and you’ve been hired as a healthcare chaplain at a local hospital. The Director of Pastoral Care turns to you and says, “Well, since you’re the newest chaplain you get to preach at our bi-annual memorial service for all who have passed away at the hospital since our last service.”
- You are sitting at an interview for a position as a staff chaplain at a prison. The warden who is interviewing you says, “I expect my chaplain to be the pastor of the whole prison community.”
- You get a call in the middle of the night. A Catholic patient of yours is near death and the family can't find a priest to anoint the patient. You've been asked by the nurse at their bedside to attend to them.
Good advice for anyone interested in chaplaincy would be to suspend your sectarianism. Institutional settings that have chaplains need their chaplains dedicated to interfaith ministry. Chaplains need to be of service to all of those within their institutional setting. Suspending your sectarianism doesn’t mean sacrificing who you are as a minister, priest, or cleric. It means being open to diversity and being able to embrace that diversity to be of service to others where you find them. This means being strong in your own religious conviction. Your identity as a Chaplain should flow from your theology and that theology should be expansive enough to embrace the needs of others both within and outside of your tradition. Suspending your sectarianism means your agenda is one of service and compassion; and the person with whom the Chaplain serves sets the agenda.
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Valerie Cole is my thesis chair, and David Oringderff is also on my committee. I'll be glad to share the thesis with you when it -
Very interesting topic. Who is your thesis advisor? I'd be interested in reading it. I'm a Gulf War veteran myself. -
Carol... congratulations on your studies! That must have been a lot of hard work. What are you writing your thesis on? I imagin
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My thesis got started because I became interested in the rising rates of suicide among combat veterans...which led me to the topic
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Great post! Like Sandy, I am working as a volunteer chaplain at our local hospital where I primarily do grief work with families
